Journey of Healing: Gray Is the New Black by Dorothy Rice

Most girls spend the first ten years in their bodies blissfully unconscious of the roller coaster to come. They hit puberty and spend the next ten years in love/hate with the same, albeit changing body. They learn to conflate their body’s pleasure with its power to attract. The confusion in this equation often leads to abuse, whether in aggressive workouts to keep one’s shape or in self-defeating addictions to drugs, booze, or sex with bad men. Whether they eat too little or too much, a lot of women age forty-five and up struggle with some kind of food issue. If a woman’s lucky, and willing to put in the intense inner work, she might spend the final third of her of life repairing the damage that’s been done, finally healing the relationship she’s developed with her physical self.

Dorothy Rice’s memoir, Gray is the New Black, chronicles this journey of healing. The author, a retired California civil service worker in her early sixties, vows to take a year, from January to January, to understand the stagnation in her marriage, face her on-going food issues, and devote time to her writing life. She signs up for a book-in-a-year writing class and decides her project will be this memoir, the year she takes “to get my shit together.” Her goal is ambitious: to “crack the code of living my life in the now,” to make “peace with the past and embrace the present.”

Key characters in the book are the author’s two sisters: younger, fit, driven Juliet, and the free-spirited Roxanne, Rocky, four years the author’s senior. Rice’s husband is another major figure in the book; the author married Bob later in life and the two raised a blended family of teens, plus had a daughter of their own when Rice was forty-four.

Early in the book, Rice’s sister Rocky challenges her to stop dyeing her hair. In the spirit of personal rebirth, Rice accepts her sister’s challenge and two months later, Rice has what one observer calls a “reverse hombre,” with silver streaks growing down into the dark brown. Her hair draws stares and compliments. Even Rice herself loves her hair. As such, her hair acts as a life preserver for the memoir, an honest, thorough chronicle of a debilitating sugar addiction, a years-long relationship with a sexual predator, an abusive first marriage, and ongoing struggles with yo-yo dieting.

From the beginning Rice is upfront about her sugar addiction. Though she begs her husband to hide the jumbo-sized bags of chocolate Halloween candy, she also admits that most people are like Bob, “they don’t get it.” They don’t see the difference between a “major sweet tooth” and a food addiction. “If you’re an addict, you don’t have [just] a taste of heroin,” Rice claims. Nor do you have “a little bit of booze or meth.”

She finds the bags, repeatedly inspects them for holes, a way in. A day or two later, she finds one — Bob must have sampled them — and the binge begins. She starts with just a dozen, then a dozen more. Then the bag is empty. Twelve hours later comes the consequence: a brutal migraine brought on by the sugar, hours of vomiting, dry heaves, wetting herself, and pain in her head that makes her skull feel like a “flaming match tip.” She lays delirious in the dark, vowing never to binge again. 

Until, of course, she does. Such is the nature of addiction. Just as the author can’t stop the bingeing, neither can the reader look away from the harrowing, honest descriptions of an addict in the throes. The power of the scene comes in part from the book’s structure; Rice lets readers witness the first binge early and we dread the inevitable recurrence. It’s hard to read this struggle, and it gets even worse when she begins to examine past self-destructive behaviors, namely her recurring encounters with the rapist she first met at age fourteen.

Here the book takes a darker turn towards the underlying cause of her shame. Rice claims that most women she knows have a rape story, a fact neither defended nor analyzed. In a fiction workshop, Rice tried to write about Ron before. Readers complained that the protagonist was too passive. The story was predictable as soon as the “stupid” girl got in the car. In fact Rice’s rape story is not conventional; she is not attacked but lured into a car by a twenty-something man who regularly trolls her high school. He doesn’t pin her down and force himself upon her; he unzips his pants, grabs her by the neck and forces her to perform fellatio. In his car. Parked on the side of the road.

These encounters with Ron continue intermittently for two years. Rice’s descriptions of these horrific experiences are riveting, as is her honesty about her own confusion:

It’s hard to understand why I kept seeing Ron, why I didn’t stop. I do know that even as I came when he called and did what he asked, I desperately wanted a real boyfriend. I knew that what I did with him was nothing to be proud of. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I didn’t even like to think about it. Nor did I enjoy it or look forward to the next time. . . . It was never about me, or even about sex, but rather power, control, domination. I didn’t get this intellectually, but I knew it in my bones. I’d surrendered free will.

Later she meets some of his other victims, also students at her high school. Mandy, a friend who was disowned by her mother at age sixteen, also had dealings with Ron. But unlike Rice, Mandy refused to acquiesce. “Was he at least cute?” Rice asks Mandy. “Just another loser,” Mandy says. “I can’t believe anyone would ever fall for his bullshit.”

That Rice never admits to Mandy that she “fell for his bullshit” is telling. Perhaps more powerful is what she doesn’t say to the reader. She doesn’t describe the humiliation. She doesn’t wallow in her own gullibility. She doesn’t try to defend or justify her shame. When she finally gets free of Ron, she wants to believe that Mandy’s words triggered her self-esteem. But in fact she has “no such moment to replay and relive with pride.” More likely, she admits, she simply “aged out.” Ron lost interest.

In the middle section of the book Rice and her sister attend “fat camp,” a self-help ranch in Utah where residents see therapists and learn about nutrition. Rice hikes longer and farther than she thought possible. And she experiences inner growth: “I’ve resisted happiness for being too simple, too trite and ordinary” she understands. Yet “there’s no more innate foolishness or simple-mindedness in contentment than there is in perpetual angst.”

Perhaps what sets Gray is the New Black apart from other self-reckoning memoirs is this willingness to take responsibility for the false truths she has clung to most of her life. Nowhere is this more evident than in the description of her marriage. This vector of the memoir is even more empowering than the stark honesty with which she analyzes her time with Ron, and it’s more riveting than the train wreck of her sugar binges. Here is where the reader sees change unfolding.

Rice longs for a more passionate marriage, yet her self disgust after a bout of anxiety eating makes it evident that she doesn’t feel she deserves it: “Probably I should shut up and be happy. I have a comfortable home, a decent pension, time to do the things I want.” As such, she wonders if “a deeper emotional and physical connection, worth jeopardizing all that?”

It is and it isn’t. Rice writes scenes in which she consciously baits Bob, saying she “batted my lashes and hunched my shoulders so my breasts pressed together” then asks him the mother lode of loaded questions: “Do you think I’m beautiful?”  Bob, a retired engineer, responds, “It doesn’t matter how you look. I’m already in love with you.”

Early in the book we sympathize with Rice; Bob is a “literal kind of guy,” and more than a little dense when it comes to speaking his feelings. But Rice baits him in this way repeatedly, and he fails repeatedly. She admits that she can’t be angry; she has gained weight and knows she doesn’t look her best.

By the book’s end, after her year spent excavating shame, Rice can admit that she has “waited all [her] life for a man to say the prescribed magic words to me, to perform the prescribed grand gestures.” Feeling cheated, she has assumed she wasn’t good enough to get the “Lifetime movie moments.” But when she is finally honest with herself, Rice sees that her lifelong dissatisfaction is based on fairytales and movies. Are these good enough reasons, she wonders, “to hold my husband at arm’s length until he utters the magic words? . . .  Does my piano have more than one insistent sour note to plink?”

With incisive, lyrical prose, Dorothy Rice articulates something important about generations of women, especially those who find comfort in language, reading and writing and use these tools to discover why it was so important to them to fit in, to belong, to be wanted by a man, even a bad man, or the wrong man. Why does a woman as smart as Rice “hate herself,” as her mother asks her as an adolescent? We may not get an answer, as readers or writers, or parents, even as older, wiser women looking back at our younger selves.

But that doesn’t mean we should stop asking the questions.